A Decade of Digital Photography That Changed My Life

Somewhere in TENNESSEE in 2009, one of my Earliest DSLR shots

10 years ago this week, I bought my first serious digital camera, and that purchase changed my life. I was into photography as a teenager, worked on the yearbook, and considered photojournalism as a career, but instead ended up happily working in entertainment technology for the last few decades. After college, I lost darkroom access, and drifted away from my serious camera and casually into a series of point and shoot film and then early digital cameras. But 10 years ago, I decided to take the plunge on a Nikon DSLR, and today photography is a big part of my life; in fact, many new friends from the last decade don’t even know that my primary career is in A/V and that I wrote a book on show networking. So while my photographic interests are pretty varied, I generally strive for the same thing: to freeze a moment in time as it emerges from a chaotic scene--a figurative or literal storm. I don’t have the patience or the imagination to work in the studio, but I’m totally engrossed facing a tornado, a wild live show, a circus or on the Coney Island boardwalk on a Saturday night. These are the places where I feel most at home as a photographer.

I did a lot of theatre in school and in my first years in NYC, and worked at the Metropolitan Opera and with the NY Philarmonic for many years. But my heart was always in music and edgier kinds of performance without a fourth wall, and in the last decade photography has gotten me closer than ever to those scenes. My main entry into that world was through one NYC cultural institution: Joe McGinty’s Loser’s Lounge. I’ve been going to see the Loser’s since 2004, and in 2009 started bringing my camera and posting photos on my blog in those pre-Facebook days. At first, no one with the show knew who I was, but, little by little--and especially once Facebook started getting popular--the word got out. And from there, the camera gave me a way to comfortably go to shows on my own where I don’t know anyone, without having to explain the show or the scene or the weirdness to a friend or date. And through photos and Facebook and many other connections, I now count as friends an amazing group of performers from and fellow fans of the various NYC scenes of music, circus, side show, variety, burlesque and all kinds of things in between. Most people go out more in their 20s than in their 50s but (as with many things) I’ve been late to the party—all I did when I was younger was work.

I’ve always loved the water and especially the ocean, and beach towns have long held a special place in my heart; as a kid our vacation week each summer was spent in Ocean City Maryland, where I saw an exciting world that seemed way cooler than my corn-field home town. Of course Coney Island offers photographers the usual excitement of the carnival: the colors and the light and the sky. But in Coney it’s really the diversity of people there on a summer night that makes it special. So I can get lost in the crowd on the boardwalk, but I also shoot there in all seasons. When I’m feeling down or lonely, just heading out there with my camera—even (especially) in a blizzard—can change my whole mood. Feeling the expanse of the ocean horizon is something I need at least every few weeks. And in addition, there’s a band of artists and performers and photographers who hang out in Coney that I’ve come to know in recent years, and of course that connection has come through photography.

All my life I’ve been drawn to severe weather, and in 2008 I started storm chasing in the plains, trying to capture the intensity of the storm with my camera. Since then I’ve made time in my schedule every year to chase, have driven tens of thousands of miles and seen a bunch of tornadoes and all kinds of amazing weather. To me, being in front of these majestic storms is humbling and even calming--once getting a panic attack in an MRI machine I tried to imagine a place where I felt calm; standing in front of a violent storm in the great plains is immediately where my head went.

And while I still have a very active career in entertainment technology, I mean it when I say that photography has changed my life over the last decade. Through photography I’ve gotten to know a bunch of people who are proudly themselves, often out of the mainstream, and never dull. My closest friends today I’ve met in the last decade and are people I likely would have never met otherwise. Hanging out with (or trying to date) these creative people, talking music and art is when I feel most like I’m where I always was meant to be. Despite all the changes over the nearly 30 years I’ve been here, over the last decade it feels like I finally arrived in the NYC I dreamed of in my cornfield home town all those years ago. And that all started when I bought a DSLR in 2009.

See my photo portfolio here.

Note: I couldn’t possibly narrow down the hundreds of thousands of photos I’ve shot in the last decade to pick favorites; instead the photo above is one of the first I shot with my first real digital camera, somewhere on a back road in Tennessee back with my sister and her friend on the way to Dollywood over Thanksgiving break in 2009.

Note: For my fellow photo geeks, I started with a Nikon D90, then a D7000, then a D600, then a D610, then a D850, and now two Z6’s which are the best cameras I’ve ever had.